This summer, my Partner in Torah and I started learning Chumash with Rashi. We began with Bereishis and are now in middle of Lech Lecha. This is virtually my first time re-approaching Chumash-Rashi since seminary, with the exception of a few aliyos here and there, and it’s going very differently than anticipated. Before we started learning, I had assumed that this would be a review of what I already knew, but each time we learn together, I find things that are straight out in the text that I never saw before.
For example, we just learned (12:2) about how Hashem did not tell Avram Avinu where he was going to end up when He said “lech lecha,” because Hashem wants to give tzaddikim s’char for each step that they follow Him. This made me think of my own journey now and the journey of so many others in my life. We know that “lech lecha,” we have to do things, to move out of our comfort zones to become who we’re meant to be, but we don’t know where we are being led to. We just need to keep listening for Hashem’s messages of what the next right thing to do is, and keep moving in the direction He leads us. But I would never have had that insight a few years ago.
Or in Parshas Noach, where Rashi says (7:13) that the people of Noach’s generation plotted among themselves to kill Noach if they saw him entering the teivah. How desperately do we not want to know the truth that is in front of our eyes?
There’s another thing, too: when we learned about how Avram Avinu traveled from Ur Kasdim to Charan and then to Canaan and down to Egypt, I could see it in my mind’s eye. I know what the landscape looks like now. And a caravan of camels, and the tents. That never happened before. And now it’s the case for all of Tanach.
Learning Chumash-Rashi from an adult perspective is a new experience. I highly recommend doing it, maybe just one aliyah of the parsha of the week, or a parsha you never learned inside, or starting from Bereishis. Whatever you can fit in.
Is this something you do already? I know some of my friends try to learn the parsha over Shabbos, which is so amazing. How recently have you learned Chumash inside?
